1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for evaluating the information disseminated on Web pages of Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
A set of Web pages normally comprises a top page and a plurality of pages linked to the top page in a hierarchical structure, and each page includes dissemination information. It is said that there are two through four billions of Web pages in the world. To appropriately disseminate information in a domain by enterprises and persons having the same purpose, it is not satisfactory only to plan to increase the frequency of access to the Web pages or simply arrange the format. Furthermore, since a retrieving technology using a keyword is being widely spread, it is important to appropriately prepare dissemination contents on a Web page to be retrieved.
To attain this, it is necessary to evaluate in detail the contents of the information disseminated on a Web page, and to enhance the value and the completion level of the Web page by properly feeding back the evaluation result.
It is necessary to enhance the completion level of a Web page not only to disseminate information to a viewer, but also to effectively prepare the Web contents for supporting the development technology in the process of developing the technology of extracting information, summarizing information, etc. because the extraction and the summarization of information are based on each piece of target information disseminated on the Web page.
Several evaluation criteria of a Web page have already been suggested as described in the following electronic information mainly in the nations of English speaking people.
J. Alexander and M. A. Tate, Evaluating Web Resources, 1996.
The evaluation criteria are obtained by adding the features of Web to evaluation items on common printed matter. For example, there is ‘critical evaluation of a Web page using a check list and its effect’ with the current state of Web taken into account and a check list generated including new viewpoints. On the other hand, the value of a Web page can also be computed by the time required to open the Web page with a view to attraction of the attention by the largest possible number of viewers. Furthermore, an attempt to evaluate a Web page by requesting a large number of registered members to answer questionnaires has already been practically realized.
However, in the above mentioned conventional technology, the contents of the descriptions on a Web page are not explained, but formal evaluation and subjective evaluation are mainly described. Therefore, there is the problem that an evaluation value depends on the value judgments and current situation of an evaluator.